Cloud Pak user experiences
At the start of a Cloud Pak for Business Automation project, you are likely to define one or more business cases. Your business case depends on your enterprise needs and which components you plan to use.
If stakeholders decide that the project is a go, you might want to create a project initiation document (PID). A PID outlines the purpose and participants of the project. A PID is likely to include business needs, stakeholders, the business case, and a description of the people who are involved in the project.
As you progress with specific goals for your teams, and applications and services are developed, it can help to group certain tasks into activities that have broadly the same user experience. The Cloud Pak software needs many different skills and business experts, so it can help to identify the targeted user experience when you set up these goals.
The Cloud Pak for Business Automation user experience is divided into Discover, Operate, Build, Use, and Manage. An experience does not impose the order in which work is done, but it can help to categorize the type of task that a team is working on. Placing tasks into a user experience can help you to manage, track, and measure your project progression and performance.
Discover
Before you decide where and what you want to install from Cloud Pak for Business Automation, spend some time to review your choices. Play with the software that interests you and evaluate it. Define your requirements, identify your options, and make a shortlist. A perfect one-size-fits-all solution does not exist when it comes to software, but you can look at the Big Automation Picture and create a plan for potential improvement to your business. Finally, prioritize your needs, clarify your expectations, and do a cost benefit analysis.
Operate
Installation of the Cloud Pak on a private cloud needs specialized technical expertise. In almost all cases, a cluster administrator is needed to help set up the environment and keep operations available and working correctly. If some feasibility testing needs to be done, you might need to install 1 or 2 capabilities to demonstrate the Cloud Pak. The operate user experience is involved in a project from start to finish and likely to be responsible for setting up clusters for each stage in a project's lifecycle. These users help to deploy, scale, and maintain the services in production and beyond.
Build
Many of the Cloud Pak components need developers to build the services and to create KPIs and dashboards the business needs to monitor the operations. Developers work closely with business domain experts and analysts to define the business events to monitor and to build the applications that call the Cloud Pak services.
Use
Business experts, process owners, and data scientists can help to build the services and in many cases are the targeted consumers of the service endpoints. These users need to interact with their business data in applications and need access to dashboards to be alerted when something does go wrong, or might go wrong.
Manage
IT projects often use a set of practices and tools to move between stages of completion and offer the right amount of visibility to the individuals involved. It is expected that you have a solid IT project management process in place, and that you incorporate a clear roadmap. A roadmap helps everyone to see the bigger picture and work toward a common set of goals.
Whatever project management software you use, you must capture the proper amount of information with the right granularity and monitoring to keep projects efficient and on track. Business managers need visualization, recommendations, and alerts to help them manage their applications and processes effectively.
Do not underestimate the need for reporting. Cloud Pak for Business Automation generates many logs, so it is imperative that you store and monitor the logs and use the tools that are provided to help you to do this work.